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Start and stop recording via telnet

I have an unsubbed Philips S1 TiVo I want to use to record videos from SD sources such as VCR tape. I have the unit attached to a Yamaha AVR as VCR2, taking it's input from the recording jacks of the AVR and sending its output to the VCR2 input jacks. Of course, I can always switch the AVR over to the TiVo output, use the TiVo remote to start a manual recording of sufficient duration to cover the entire source video, switch the AVR back to the source, start the video, and then wait for the manual recording to end before moving on. This is rather clumsy, however. What's worse, I have a Series III TiVo collocated with the S1, and remote confusion ensues.

What I would like to do is cover up the IR port of the S1 and simply start and stop recording with a simple pair of tcl scripts, say recstart and recstop. (Of course it could even be a single script using $0 and a pair of soft links, or $1 and a pair of aliases.) I am not an expert in tcl, but I think I have enough of an understanding to cover this. What I don't know at all is how I could control the recorder to force it to start and stop recording on cue. Can anyone point me to a reference?

you could set each tivo to its own remote address to avoid "remote confusion" issues.

I tried that once, long ago, but I didn't get it to work. OTOH I didn't try very hard. Maybe I'll try it again. The problem is, this only addresses one of the two issues. A script to record and stop recording would kill both birds with one stone.

Originally Posted by jt1134

tivoweb. there's plenty of tcl code in there to illustrate initiating a recording thru tivosh.

Well, maybe too much. I looked through a bunch of the .tcl and .itcl and all that jumped out at me were interfaces with TWP itself to implement things from the web GUI. Maybe I just looked at the wrong ones. There are, after all, a great many of them. Do you know of a couple of specific ones that might illustrate it well?

Try using a DTV front panel. I put a front panel from a SIR S4080R on a TCD240080 and it works just fine. Although there is no record button, recording can be initiated by pushing the info button and then the select button (while the info banner is still up). Recording will start at the beginning of the buffer. If you want a clear buffer, change channels, then initiate the recording.

With software 8.3, the recording does not stop as advertized, ie. press info and then select (Tivo just hangs, pull-the-plug-reboot req'd).
Instead, navigate to the Now Showing list, select the item that is currently recording, then select Stop Recording.